Hacker News Reader

Comment by igorlev | Hacker News Reader

I love the fact that a large portion of medicine is basically debugging and reverse engineering as a profession.

It seems to be a good time in the debugging of these complex pathways as there's another, related avenue of signal manipulation research that may lead to scar-less tissue healing (https://science.sciencemag.org/content/372/6540/eaba2374)

View on HN

I do molecular biology full time, but I truly believe that I learnt the skills I need to do this in my first project where I took over a several thousand line perl web app. The developer had been extremely clever with his use of tricks, which made debugging and reverse engineering a massive challenge. I often needed to internalise the state of the whole app to reason about why things were going wrong.

Those skills have served me well in my current work in debugging biological systems, where the organisms responsible for all these “clever” hacks are long gone, and all we’re left with is a system that often doesn’t boot back up after a crash.

How would a software dev get into doing molecular biology?

Probably a masters program / PhD if you’ve got a compelling argument as to why you would be a good candidate.

I'd add that you need to do the homework first: If you can adequately formulate and articulate the problem that the lab is solving, and that one cool trick you have that can solve it, that's already a great signal that you would work well (Chances are your trick won't work, but that's only because biology is merciless).

A large portion of most professions is basically debugging and reverse engineering :) (including non-technical ones, like psychology or law)

And that tells us that it's a general skill worth teaching in schools. Regardless of the profession a student ends up in, this skill is likely to be useful.

The whole parable of Chesterton's fence hinges on that: reverse-engineer the weird thing to understand it, before attempting to alter it.

It's true for law, but for psychology I found that most practicioners use most of their time to sell the reason of their whole existence, so it seems closer to sales.

Live debugging

Reply on news.ycombinator.com